


insect girl

by saturno



Category: Outlast (Video Games)
Genre: Bugs & Insects, Cancer, Childhood Sexual Abuse, Deliberate Triggering, Flashbacks, Gaslighting, Graphic Rape, Gross, Hallucinations, Lowercase, M/M, Mental Disintegration, Music, NSFW Art, Non-Consensual Oral Sex, Pseudoscience Bullshit, Psychological Torture, Sadism, Vomit
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-08-19
Updated: 2017-08-25
Packaged: 2018-02-13 18:49:45
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 6
Words: 15,328
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2161257
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/saturno/pseuds/saturno
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"JACK-BOOTED FUCKS, I KNOW WHAT YOU'VE BEEN DOING TO ME, IKNOWWHATYOU'VEBEEN-"</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. the man from nowhere

**Author's Note:**

> a time near the beginning of eddie gluskin's therapy.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> chapter title is a [throbbing gristle track](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VpwpYvHnCVU)

"how're we feeling today."

the room isn't cold but the exposed parts of skin on gluskin's neck and forearms are prickling with goosebumps. the metal restraints at his wrists and ankles are sound but rattle and creak with the sheer force of his shivering. his eyes are piercing up from the lock around his skull, bloodshot. like he's forgetting to blink. there are still splotches of blood marring the sclera of his right eye from the subconjunctival hemorrhages that happened in his last therapy session in this room, blotchy ruptured blood vessels snaking through the white.

"no no," gluskin murmurs in a voice that knows and understands that its fate is sealed, a soft voice that looks its predator in the eye and pleads weakly for its life. sweet as pie. "no no, no," his huge ribcage fluttering with each sharp shallow breath as gluskin's eyes whip to and fro, from andrew's apathetic face to the dim glow of the nine engine screens in front of his chair, warming up and blank with soft white light, the screens and the digital camera standing on its tripod in the corner like a silent observer. hyperventilation kept barely at bay. his hands are tight brick fists that tremble and rattle his confines, rattle the chair.

andrew watches impassively for a few moments longer.

"don't like the movies?" he asks like he's talking more to himself as he reaches in and pulls at the rigid metal straps digging in around gluskin's skull, prying gently at a corner, testing for solidity. he can see the straining in the thick muscles of gluskin's neck as he reflexively tries to turn his head and goes nowhere. bolted in. bolted down.

"thought you liked making movies."

"please," his voice is getting faster, stumbling over his words, "please, i'm doing, i'm doing well, i don't need to dream again. i saw him, i met him, i met him so i don't, i don't need to meet him anymore, i did it," babbling, his eyes locking onto andrew's as the speech mushes together in a muddied blur of slurring stutters, breathing so fast and eyes so wide and pieces of his jumpsuit soaking through in icy sweat. "i did good," he pleads in a cracking voice, dropping in volume to a whisper under his breath, strangled by an ancient brute animal fear clawing its way up his esophagus and into his head, "i did good, i did good. please."

the sheer mass of gluskin's body makes the scenario, for andrew, all the more privately ludicrous. the size made some sense, considering the personal history laid out in the copies of gluskin's charts that dr. snow had been kind enough to make him aware of. the product of a little boy's want to be big and strong, something basic and simple like that. he builds up a thick outer shell so he can try and be bigger than any of his personal demons. his built-up brute strength taken away from him like this is part of what's driving gluskin right back into that primitive fear, nudges him down a slippery slope that he fights against with every helpless slide. the cuffs are still clacking around his limbs and his trunk as his body trembles and pulls against them, every muscle rigid and solid under sallow skin as he jitters and jitters and goes nowhere, and it all loops back around into the growing dark panic smearing over his features.

being big doesn't work anymore, and now all he's got left is sweet talking and denial. remnants of past defense mechanisms. childhood coping strategies all squirting out as though from a festering abscess deep down underneath the skin.

gluskin is an easy read, andrew thinks to himself and not so unconsciously licks his dry lips. an easy push.

"you did really good," he says straight back into gluskin's face as he hears the flickering behind him of the nine screens coming on. "you did great." gluskin is staring him in the eyes still, making every attempt to not look at the jolting writhing imagery flashing across the wall, calling out to him, seducing his attentions. his face is so knotted and screwed up in panic that andrew wonders if he's going to start crying.

"please, pleaseplease please," his voice is pitching up, up, whimpering, strangling itself on his own fear, knowing where this is going to take him again, where this is going to rip him right back to, "i did everything right. idideverythingright."  
"you did everything right," andrew parrots, hands on either side of gluskin's chair as he leans in, watching closely.

"ffuck you," the patronizing is too much for gluskin to hold himself together against anymore and his face is going red, cracking, restraints rattling louder, "motherfucker, motherFUCKER, DON'T DO THIS, YOU FUCKING SHIT, DON'T, NO NONO YOUFUCKING PIGSHITBITCHNONONO-" louder and louder, shuddering harder, harder, dissolving into a wordless long open wail, his eyes slamming shut in his scream and andrew's hands snapping in and brute force prying his eyelids open with his thumbs.

"you have to watch," andrew chides, low and staring up from under his brow, watching the icy blue chips of gluskin's eyes lock onto the screens by mistake for a split second and instantly stick there like a bug on flypaper. trapped. his pupils dilate wide and black immediately as something takes hold. visions of wings, of flaky shedding dead skin peeling off into layers. or so andrew's been told.  
pained, clenched noises like the visions are branding themselves into his brain and behind his eyes, like his mind is being shocked with a cattle prod. the moaning sounds that drip out of gluskin's mouth are miserable, writhing on the high pitch ends of his range, raw and terrified and private strain against something pulling his awareness inward. his body shuddering. his face as he loses track of the room. his eyes as he loses track of the things around him.

andrew always sits and watches the patients plummet down into the semiconscious lucid dream darkness when he does this, and sometimes they are afraid and sometimes they have no reaction at all. it's part of his job description to oversee the process. facilitate the sink into the designated dreams. gluskin's file is full of photocopies of newspaper articles from the 1970s and polaroid after polaroid after polaroid of a little boy in a dress with the same terrified eyes as the patient in front of him, the patient staring straight ahead into the flashing screens and seeing absolutely nothing of andrew or the room around him, seeing something private and all-consuming of his reality, decades and decades old. his mouth is moving but no discernible words are coming out.

andrew is hunched in close enough to the body fastened into the chair that he can smell the thick sweat drooling down the sides of gluskin's head. there's sweat on the ends of his green neoprene gloves from where he touched the man's face, and he brings one hand up to his mouth and slurps the sweat off his thumb like he's eating ribs. something sloppy that's getting sauce everywhere, all over his hands. salt and cold and slippery across his tongue.

"don't you like making movies with daddy?"

and gluskin does not look at him - cannot - but the expression that rips across his face is immediate, lightning fast, like a shotgun blast square in the center of the chest that pulverizes his heart, all the remaining blood and color draining from his face. a suggestion in the rising portion of a drug trip that spins the entire experience out of control and off its rails, pitching and rolling, tumbling down into hell. open watery fear and a low humming warbling from the pits of his chest.

"what kind of movies did you make?"

"f. fish. fishing trips," he stutters through gritted teeth, gritted and grinding and chattering like he's getting cold, a lie choked out from his quivering lungs like he can't stop himself from answering, like he needs to verbally cling as tight as he can to the manufactured truth, to keep it from draining away. "up at. barr lake. va. vacation videos. fishing."  
his eyes are clouding over. something ruptures in his right eye again. blood pooling in the sclera, circling the lower half of the iris.

"little girl like spending time with her daddy?" andrew's voice is lower, murmuring coarsely into gluskin's ear. he breathes through his nose and shuts his eyes, drowning himself in the experience of scent. the pungent razor wire stench of fear.

"ffish," something small in gluskin pleads, "fishing. w, w, once we. caught a," stutter. slur. his shoulders _jolt_ in their restraints as though shocked, seizing, pouring sweat and staring straight ahead and his eyes vibrating in their sockets, "a big. ti. tiger muskie."  
"mmhmm?" his tongue is out of his mouth and pressing in, skimming along across the stubbly shaven area of gluskin's scalp, a spot just over his temple, up the side of his head and into his hairline. salt and skin and human grease. gluskin is making a noise like a whine, something dazed from someone still half asleep and unsure of where his dream ends and the waking world begins. sickened and nostalgic.  
"i, i l. l. llove," he sputters through the burning pain in his head and his ribcage slowly, clumsily, drooling down the front of his chest. "goingg. upp. tthere."

"do you wanna be a good girl for me?" andrew murmurs messily into the ear he's tonguing, hand on the other side of gluskin's face and pushing his fingers into the soft flaccid yield of his cheek. he's gone slackjawed, and the noises that come out of him are sedated and drunk. confused. the dream and the sensations melding into one another, compressing, fusing. there are tears balancing on the edges of his eyelids and andrew's mouth pushes in against one immediately, coaxing the crying out, drinking it in.  
"are you gonna be good?" andrew prompts again, pushing, squeezing his patient's face harder until gluskin's mouth opens and a noise like "yhhhhh" drips out into his lap. something peeled wide open and rubbed bloody and raw. a memorized, rehearsed reaction to age-old, primordial pain.  
"yhhh, yhhsss... yhehhss..."

"wanna make daddy happy?"

"ghhh... ghhhoodd... iimm..."

"you're so good. you're doing so good. my sweet girl."

"gghkkdd... hhh..."

"can you open up for daddy, baby?" as his free hand reaches down the front of his scrubs, fisting his cock immediately. swollen and tight like a burn. "can you do that?"  
gluskin's jaw pops audibly in a corner as his mouth cracks open fast, like a reflex. like muscle memory. a walkway trampled in overgrown brush, trampled and trampled and trampled until everything green in its path dies. his mouth opens wide and his tongue pushes out over his bottom teeth without thinking, without seeing. blood vessels bursting in his other unfocused eye. andrew is repositioning his body over the chair, forcing the waistband of his scrubs down, pulling himself free as fast as he can because standing like this partially blocks gluskin's view of the screens - though it doesn't take long at all, because he's there, he's been right there, and he pumps through his fist twice and cums immediately, so hard that he grunts and his knees threaten to buckle. it coats gluskin's tongue and hits him once in the side of the face, and he doesn't react. doesn't seem to notice.

but he swallows slowly without having to be told.


	2. perception is the only reality

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> third session

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> andrew is my favorite background character  
> this wound up being a little longer than i thought it'd be
> 
> chapter title is a [throbbing gristle track](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7eLPRqjcrgM)

andrew can't actually remember the last time he saw sunlight.  
  
when you worked for a place like this, in his position, leaving the work site became something that wasn't really "necessary," and there were accommodations for such "necessary" staff further underground. the living quarters section, stuffy little hotel-looking rooms lined up next to one another like punched slots in the sticky honeycomb of a beehive. that made him one of the little bee maggots, maybe. he felt like one sometimes, insulated and untouched by outside light like this, his skin turning waxy and pale as the weeks went on. weeks, and then months. and months. and months.  
  
the air here in his room is filtered and cool, and the water out of the taps tastes like chlorine when he soaks his toothbrush in it in the mornings. when he opens the scratchy red curtains covering the singular window in his room, there is only opaquely frosted glass and fake fluorescent light coming from behind it, warm tones in the morning and dim cool tones at night. meant to mimic the sun. like it's supposed to offer him comfort. but all it does is remind him of where he is, where he lives now. wakes and eats and works and shits and sleeps now. deep underground like a cicada larva.  
there's no way to turn the ambient light off. he keeps the curtain closed but it oozes in around the fabric anyway. spills in like poison gas.  
  
andrew winds up dreaming of clouds sometimes. hot wind and clicking summer insect sounds, and when he wakes up from these dreams in his artificially lit climate-controlled cave, he is always groggier, blearier, even more tired than when he went to sleep. coffees and ecigs in the mornings and the cheap acrid vodka he's got stashed under the bedside table at night. every night. it's not free, it's overpriced and coming straight out of his paycheck, but he doesn't care. it's the only way he can wake up and then the only way he can sleep. deep and dead and dreamless if he's lucky.  
  
dale is the new screen technician he has to work with, and dale is still so new that he doesn't really get when he should be keeping his mouth shut yet. talks too much. still too excited about the position he's landed himself and all the zeroes on his annual salary. 24 year old kid's first big boy security clearance job. he's only been here three or four weeks, and the lack of light or air or open space hasn't gotten to him yet. not too badly, at least.  
unless the chattiness is how his nervousness manifests itself. andrew doesn't want to consider that.  
  
"one ninety-six fucking deserves it," dale spits through a mouthful of breakfast sandwich, stuffing the eggs and bread and grease in his pimply face as he pads right behind andrew on their way to the elevators, half a step too close. "you hear about what else is in that guy's file? some of the shit he did to those women?"  
"uhuh," andrew says back, tired, noncommittally and without looking at him. without really listening to him either. content to let dale talk to himself and grunt in response at the appropriate moments. there's a pulsing nauseous pre-migraine throb right behind his eyes this morning, and he blinks slowly at the elevator doors and slurps at his coffee anyway. the elevator is twenty floors away.  
"he doesn't even give a shit. you ask him about it and he just pretends like nothing happened," he can hear dale shaking his head and making scoffing noises in a big show of moral outrage. like he's trying to hammer home just how much this supposedly bothers him.  
  
but andrew had caught him staring twice already. the first time when he'd reached out and struck mr. "one ninety-six" open-palm across the face, and then again in the second session. right at the end. when he realized what andrew was doing.  
the screen techs had a solid black visor they had to wear over the porthole in their gas masks that was supposed to keep any peripheral vision sightings of the engine visions at bay.  
(supposed to, anyway. there had been an accident with the last technician's mask - a slip and a fall, a crack across the black plating as the man, not realizing what had happened to his mask, looked up, up and straight into the screens by mistake. hence the need for a replacement. hence dale.)  
  
(andrew never wore his. he just knew better than to look.)  
(he didn't need it. he wasn't an idiot.)  
  
the mask had blocked off dale's face, but andrew saw his body go completely rigid during that second session. saw dale's head aimed right in their direction. dead silent and watching from behind his podium just outside the glass walled room. held rapt. andrew knows what this big show of indignation probably really is. dale wants to see more blood, and now he feels justified in his desire, having found a perfect scapegoat in one ninety-six's past brutalities. in andrew's present behavior. he's a boy stumbling across his dad's crusty playboys for the first time. he's a shit kid realizing the things he's going to be able to get away with here, and now he's tripping all over his excitement.  
  
dale didn't say anything directly about what had happened in the second session and still hasn't said anything. but he's a poorly hidden ball of nervous excited energy now, mumbling and cramming more and more of his sandwich in his mouth before he can swallow his previous bites. nervous eater. he's flexing his free hand into a fist and then a wide stretch, repeatedly, thick black latex glove squeaking loudly with every movement.  
the elevator's still eight floors away, and andrew can feel the headache starting to really dig in. chomping down sloppily like his brain's bubble gum.  
  
"so fuck this guy," dale grunts flippantly, and andrew can hear small pieces of chewed food hitting the floor when he says that. "he deserves whatever's coming to him. fucking pig."  
  
dale's making himself feel better by telling himself that they deserve it. maybe he really does have some naïve, misplaced sense of justice.  
  
dale hasn't been working here long enough to understand that andrew doesn't do what he chooses to do out of any kind of sense of self righteousness.  
  
dale hasn't been working here long enough to understand that andrew does this, in some way, shape, or form, to all of his patients.  
  
because he wants to.  
  
because he is tired.  
  
and bitter.  
  
and most of all, overwhelmingly angry at the fucking garbage ambient lighting in his room.  
  
...  
  
security has to help them, because gluskin begins kicking and screaming wildly in the hallway the second he realizes what room the three guards are taking him to. lurching and twisting and writhing, like a worm run through on a hook, then his knees buckling and his whole body going limp, down into dead weight, forcing them to drag him down the hall. then his arms shooting out and his hands clawing along the smooth walls, looking for some handhold to twist his fingers into. all the while shrieking, shrieking, shapeless noises and smears of half articulated sounds that may have once been words.  
'help.' 'no.' 'motherfuckers.'  
or just 'mother,' maybe.  
  
it's only when the bigger of the security guards gets his arms around gluskin's neck - through some miracle - and crushes down in a chokehold and squeezes his airways completely shut that they're able to force him through the door, slam his sweat soaked body into the metal seat. andrew and dale swarm; the wrist restraints snap together and lock closed, and the two technicians are scrambling to finish getting the ankle cuffs on when gluskin gurgles through the strangling and starts kicking again. one foot flies right out of the harness dale's struggling with, swings forward and just barely misses andrew's throat, landing square in one of the guards' chests, doubling him over as it knocks the wind out of him.  
  
the third guard's in his face then immediately, like metal to a magnet, and punches gluskin straight in the stomach, one good tight _swing_ into the soft yield of his abdomen, tilted upwards like he's trying to force the fist in under his ribs. he's small but the muscle is coiled up and densely packed under his skin, and the blow is hurting, hurting bad. gluskin's making an incomprehensible sound, spraying saliva, and the guard hits him in the same spot again with a noise like a mallet coming down on meat. "re _lax_ stupid- you stupid mother _fucker-_ " the guard's grunting through a set jaw and furious eyes like he's livid that he's being made to deal with this first thing in the morning. hits him and hits him until he's going limp in the big guard's chokehold, limp in the chair. wheezing and drooling and gelatinous.  
  
dale is sitting motionless then, frozen solid behind his black mask - staring again - and andrew, with the throbbing in his skull reaching a fever pitch, shoves him to one side with his shoulder and reaches in past his stupefied ass to lock the ankle cuffs on.  
  
they file out, the security guards. grumbling and cursing under their breaths and the one unfortunate enough to get kicked in the chest still coughing wetly into the crook of his elbow. dale is meandering towards the door to his post outside, body language sheepish and quiet. the sliding glass doors close behind him and he heads right, stationing himself square in front of the control tower. turns his head and blank black mask in and stares. waiting for andrew to prep the syringe of apcd hormone. waiting for andrew to lower the chair's skull restraint into place. waiting for his cue to turn the screens on.  
  
just like that, it's just andrew and gluskin then. alone in this transparent glass room together. him and patient one ninety-six.  
  
dale's an idiot if he thinks andrew doesn't know about "the other stuff" in that file. if he thinks andrew hasn't seen the file. hasn't poured over that particular file, hasn't spent some time picking through and pulling out all the interesting little notes he can find.  
he's seen all the crime scene photos and all the forensic reports. gutted body after gutted body on stretcher after stretcher. a picture of a half shriveled uterus, lacerated near to pieces, sitting in a bedpan like discarded organ meat at the butcher's. the same photo repeated over and over again, a different womb seated in the same position each time. the same cuts. the same puncture marks of violent, wild stabbing.  
he's seen it. of course he's seen it. of course he knows what gluskin's done. he just doesn't care.  
at least, not in the way dale cares.  
  
one ninety-six is looking at him in an achy wet hyperventilating panic, and andrew, standing right at the foot of the chair, meets his gaze. stares right back in.  
"hnnn, nn, hnn," gluskin says, stuttering dumbly through his coughs as he tries to breathe through the radiating hot pains in his beaten gut and his compressed throat. his hands have already begun shaking, his eyes leaving andrew's face and darting over his shoulder to look just behind him. the screens. their white glow. the vision's they'll bring. the dreams.  
andrew can see his pupils narrowing down in fear from here. black little pinpoint dots in the middle of pasty blue and surrounding murky red. the whites of his eyes are still fucked up. some of the pale light of the screens is reflecting in gluskin's eyes, and it's reminding him of the blue gray glow of the ambient nighttime lighting in his fucking shoebox room, dripping through the comforter he keeps packed over his face to try and block it out.  
  
it's making him angry.  
  
"do you remember me?" andrew hears himself asking, leaning in and putting both of his hands on the armrests of the cold metal chair. it's a valid question. gluskin might not. not entirely.  
gluskin doesn't answer - still can't speak yet - but his face is telling the story for him. it's terror from knowing what the screens will do to him, but something else underneath it too. something that furrows his brows in tight, like he's trying to place andrew's face. remember something important. the details of a hazy, half forgotten dream.  
  
he remembers andrew the technician. but he isn't sure if what he remembers is real.  
  
that's good.  
that's real good.  
  
"i'm your friend. remember me?"  
he's coughing. trying to articulate something through the pain. an "ihh-" comes out of his mouth and andrew talks right over it. speaking slowly like he's talking to someone who might not understand english.  
"relax. relax. i'm here to help you."  
  
andrew's gesturing behind him with a turn of his head and a nod. gluskin's eyes follow. looks at the blank screens again.  
"listen," andrew says quietly.  
"we don't have to turn these on."  
  
he's still staring. there's sweat starting to bead on his temples. condensation on a cold glass. rain on a car window.  
  
"i don't want to have to turn them on. i know you don't like it. so we don't have to. depending on what you want.  
"you don't want us to turn that shit on, right?"  
  
gluskin is making an expression like he's hearing the words but not quite understanding them, like andrew's talking gibberish noises and not sentences. andrew leans closer, in towards his face. takes in his damaged eyes and his flat sloping nose and his gnawed cracked lips. hunkers in towards his right ear, like he's whispering a secret to him. like they're friends.  
he's taking a deep, audible breath through his nose. the smell of sweat is worming down into his brain.  
  
"you don't want that. _right?_ "  
  
cough. throat clearing noises. he's looking up at andrew from under his brow, tense, lips open, clenched teeth. trying to slow down his breathing. his heart rate. leaning his head away from andrew's face by a fraction of an inch. andrew's too close.  
"no," he finally says. tentatively. "i don't," hesitate. hard swallow. putting his voice back together. "don't want that."  
  
"we can let you go back to your cell," andrew hunches in closer through the centimeters gluskin's leaned away by. right up on his ear, and he can see a shuddery little shiver starting in the patient's chest, unfurling in his core, radiating out. gluskin's remembering something. a sensory memory of a tongue inside his ear that he still isn't sure is real.  
  
"we can just mark down that you progressed in your therapy today. nice progress."  
  
gluskin isn't saying anything. one of andrew's hands is coming up and pressing into his shoulder, clapping down and squeezing softly. he's technically not supposed to be wearing the black latex gloves he has on this time, because the patient's chart says he's got a nasty little type four allergy and will be blistering up in a little while from the contact. but he doesn't care. he doesn't give a fuck.  
  
"i can do that for you," he's murmuring low, kneading the muscle of gluskin's shoulder and letting his thin wet lips drag against the cartilage of his ear, and that's when gluskin understands exactly where this conversation is going and jerks himself away. or tries to. the shackles are rock solid, as solid as they ever were, as solid as last time, and the man in the chair is realizing this like he's completely forgotten about them. he's forgotten, and now it's all rushing back in. a tidal wave. a flash flood.  
  
"nnnNH," gluskin is groaning in a voice that's raising, rocketing up in volume, pitch, panic, panic, can't lean away any further, cuffs holding him in place, "NN _NHHH-_ "  
"okay. is that what you want?" he's standing, leaning in, half climbing into the seat with one of his legs balanced straight on gluskin's thigh, his knee pressing hard into the dense meat. pushing himself over the trapped body and twining the fingers on his other hand through the stupid fucking crop of black hair and _jerking,_ forcing his head back. forcing gluskin to look up at him, and his face is wide open and terrified and hyperventilating all over again.  
"you wanna watch your movie instead?" andrew's asking like he's chiding a little boy, gripping down tighter on the hair in his fist, so tight that he can feel strands ripping loose from his scalp. part of him wants to tear the fistful he has clean out of his fucking head.  
  
"i'll leave, and you can watch it then. if that's what you want."  
  
"FUCK YOU," the thing in the chair _screams_ and lurches so hard that the seat creaks audibly from somewhere down in its foundation. creaks, but holds, and he goes nowhere. " _FUCK YOU,_ " roaring and thrashing uselessly and he's going to bruise up something awful from how hard he's banging his wrists and ankles against the insides of the restraints, " _PIECE OF SHIT, YOU SICK FUCKING-_ "  
  
andrew punches him in the same spot in his stomach that the thick security guard had been wailing on, rears back and slams in and he isn't as strong as the guard was, but the prior soreness does the rest of the job for him, and it's enough to shut him the fuck up. he's doubling over, or trying to, moaning and losing the air in his lungs again. can feel gluskin's skull shaking as he coughs, hacks, jerking against the hand in his hair.  
  
feels himself getting hard under his scrubs, watching poor patient one ninety-six struggling with the situation like this. pulse, pulse. gluskin's noticed it too - there's no way he can't notice, andrew's got his crotch at eye level from the way he's leaned into the chair, with the way he's holding gluskin's head in place. he sees it. he sees and he knows and his eyes are squeezing shut, his face is clenching in. sore beaten breathlessness and boiling hot indignant fury and - something else underneath in his expression again. a different kind of pain oozing through. the same raw little pieces andrew had seen coming out last time.  
"piece of-" he's mumbling in a hoarse, damp voice and his head is trying to turn away, as much as the grip in his hair will allow for, his body trying and failing to contract in on itself, "piece of shit- fucking- animal-"  
  
"do you want me to help you or not."  
  
gluskin can't even speak. his eyes are still shut but his mouth is twitching into a strange shape. stretching quivering lips, exposed teeth.  
no answer. so andrew leans his hips forward and into the side of the man's face. the underbelly of his dick is pushing into his cheekbone through the material of his scrubs. there's a low noise coming from somewhere in the center of gluskin's body. an exhausted wild animal with its leg caught in a trap for days, now seeing the approaching hunter.  
  
"i want to help you," andrew's murmuring down, clenching in tighter and pulling his skull forward into his crotch in a lazy slow press, back and forth along the protrusion under his clothes.  
"do you want to watch your movie? or do you want me to help you?"  
  
and he can almost see the wheels turning in gluskin's head as he begrudgingly, nauseatingly, starts thinking, considering his options. weighing his choices. trying to figure out which is going to be the lesser of two evils. it's making the patient visibly sick to think about it, the look on his face growing bleary, half lidded and sore. he blinks and his eyes are wet. red rimmed. shuts them again immediately, chewing hard on a corner of his lower lip. trying to keep something inside him down, at bay. feelings or vomit. it isn't clear.  
"khhh," comes out of his straining face in a damp _sniff,_ his sinuses flooding.  
"you can leave right after," andrew coos, feeling himself smiling in a show of faux comfort and compassion and all that bedside manner bullshit. "i won't tell anyone that you didn't watch."  
  
and yknow,  
it's the opportunity, the off-chance that maybe andrew's being honest, that he really will let him skip out on the therapy, that this won't be as bad as the engine visions, that maybe he'll be able to avoid the sink into the waking nightmare,

that it will hurt less,

the countless what-ifs that are getting to him. changing his mind.  
  
if he plays along.  
if he does this.  
  
if he's good.  
  
gluskin opens his splotched eyes and looks up at him with a face like he's run a marathon. sick, exhausted pain. like he knows little details about what's coming that he doesn't want to know.  
"fine," he grunts in a voice so quiet and hateful that andrew can barely hear him. but it's not the answer he wanted, not the phrasing he was looking for, and he gives a hard _yank_ in his hair that makes the huge man wince.  
  
"do you want me to help you?" andrew's saying again, slower, over-enunciating. holding his hips still, letting his cock press into the side of his face and sit there. twitching hard, once. wants him to feel it. wants him to say it, that exact line, and gluskin realizes this and his face is crumpling further down into the pain he's been trying to compress and hide. into barely contained rage.  
" _i want you to help me,_ " he parrots back with his eyes shut tight again.  
  
dale's staring in from outside of the room. staring right at them both, frozen solid like a block of ice. let him get a fucking eyeful, andrew thinks venomously, acidic, biting down with his crooked teeth into the black fingers of the glove on his free hand, prying it off and discarding it on the floor next to the seat. let him look all he fucking wants. he doesn't care. gluskin's stoic little grimace is pissing him off, and the headache's pounding tight and thick in his skull, and the light, the sterile white screen light filling the room is driving him absolutely fucking crazy.  
  
he's used to this, isn't he? gluskin's got his eyes shut and he looks like he's steeling himself. taking these deliberate slow breaths like he's counting to himself in his head, inhaling for three seconds, exhaling for three seconds. slow, but shaky. it's not working so well, but he's trying. it's a conscious, floundering effort.  
andrew's bare fingers are prying inside gluskin's mouth then. moistening themselves along his tongue, gathering saliva, then pulling out, out and shoving down the front of his scrubs, pushing the loosely tied waistline down under his cock, grasping, spreading the wet over his flesh, smearing it over the head with two fingers.  
the mask of a face gluskin's been making, that brave little stoic façade he's trying to strap on, it cracks down the center almost immediately when he hears andrew's hand moving. anger and fear and trembling features, all spilling out, deep deep gasps of inhale-three exhale-three breathing, but those three seconds just seem to be getting shorter and shorter. like he's panicking. like he's anxious about something.  
andrew can't imagine what gluskin could possibly be anxious about.  
no sir.  
  
"you can't bite," andrew's saying, quickening his pace, jerking himself a hair's breadth away from shitstack number one ninety-six's chin. "if you bite, you're not leaving. that's gonna be the end of it, and you're gonna have to watch. you understand?"  
  
the face he's making, the sheer amount of oozing anger and shame, could incinerate a building down to ash. he keeps swallowing, over and over, like he's trying to force something down. all his reactions, probably. his responses. his emotions. trying to numb himself up. andrew leans in just a bit more, just enough that it's pressing in against gluskin's face and smearing cold saliva and precum against his dark lower lip,  
and with something that looks like an absolutely titanic effort  
gluskin opens his mouth.  
  
(dale is paralyzed. dale's heard the entirety of the conversation happening in the room - the glass walls offer no soundproofing whatsoever - and he is a deer in headlights. his hand that had been waiting near the keypad on the podium, waiting for andrew's cue to start the sequence, is hovering dumbly in midair, like he's forgotten all about it.)  
  
opens up and shuts his eyes and just sits there. sits there, and waits, and andrew scoots himself up a little bit more, sliding it just past his teeth, across the tip of his tongue.  
( _fuck, fuck, it's soft, it_ )  
sits there. nobody's moving.  
  
" _understand?_ " andrew says again, raising his voice, like he's losing patience, like he's thinking of turning that screen shit on anyway if he doesn't get a response fast enough, and when gluskin makes a noise in his throat - half a whine and half a guttural venom-dripping rattling - and nods his head a fraction of a shuddering straining inch that's meant to convey that _yes yes you sadistic fuck he fucking understands,_ the technician holds his breath and then _yanks_ gluskin's head forward by his hair, jamming his dick in towards the back of his throat in one fell swoop, so hard that his face crushes in against his pelvis. gluskin's eyes shoot open and he's retching immediately, high pitched gurgling, trying to pull himself back and away, trying to breathe, and andrew just follows him backwards, slamming the back of his skull against the chair and lurching forward and crushing himself harder into his mouth, pinning one ninety-six between the chair's headrest and his own body.  
  
"don't fight," he's muttering, quiet like it's more to himself than to the man struggling with the cock pistoning in his throat. "be good. don't be difficult."  
gluskin's trying then, he's really trying, maybe he's thinking that he's come this far and is already here in the middle of it and fuck if he's screwing it all up for himself now. andrew can tell he's trying; he's holding himself rock solid still, trying to adjust, trying to breathe through his nose, to let his throat get used to the intrusion. stop gagging. adjust. adjust. relax. there's a nasty little realization in andrew's mind that of course gluskin would know exactly how to do this, know exactly how to relax himself and let something in, ( _ooh,_ ) and it makes him throb, strain, pulse harder and leak slippery beads of precum in his mouth as he twists both hands down tight around his sweat-drenched skull.  
  
he keeps one ninety-six's head crushed against the back of the chair and thrusts, burrowing in, grinding as deep as he can reach into the back of his mouth. gluskin's eyes are shut and straining, lashes damp and quivering as he takes it, forces himself to acclimate. to not gag. struggling through the ordeal. andrew can imagine him focusing hard on that faint little light at the end of the tunnel, thinking about being out of here and back in his cell, wrapped tight in his dirty sheets or balled up on the floor under the cot in his room, whatever solitude he's daydreaming of. maybe imagining being nowhere near mount massive at all. he's bearing down and pulling his hair again, angling gluskin's head up, sinking himself deep into the wet in short angry jerks.  
fucker thinks he's just gonna tune out and ignore it?  
  
"use your tongue," he breathes, and gluskin makes a distressed, sour noise in his throat that reverberates straight through andrew's dick, feels the low vibration of sound waves shooting up his nerves, ( _mmn,_ ) feels his tongue start to move, press up against the underside as it slides across, pushing soft and hot into his skin. there's pressure, but he's just leaving it there, letting andrew move how he wants across it. andrew's pulling back, pulling half out. not enough.  
  
"like how daddy showed you."  
  
no. oh _no, no, no not this._ gluskin's face is going shock white, pale and sweating and eyes vibrating, losing focus like he's going to pass out. like he's going to be sick. like a disease has him in its clutches, the flu, swine flu, bird flu, anything that's going to strike him mercifully fucking dead right then and there. his face is clenching hard like a hand behind the skin is squeezing everything in towards the center, like he's still clinging to whatever fantasyland thing he's imagining that's getting him through this, like he's chanting _just get it over with_ in his brain, and then andrew feels it. the tongue shivering, shifting, fluttering, the tip of it reaching under and squirming down hard against his frenulum, curling around underneath and wriggling back and forth along the short stretch of tissue.  
  
andrew stops dead in place. holy shit it's nice, it's real fucking nice - it's shooting a disorienting shock of disgusted arousal straight up andrew's spine, coursing through his body. dizzying. without looking away he starts sliding again, slowly, pumping halfway into his mouth in sluggish shallow movements, drinking in the shit gluskin's doing with his tongue. it's disgusting. gluskin's fucking disgusting. he remembers so vividly that he's able to do it again at the drop of a hat like this? it's that beaten into him?  
  
"good, you're doing good. real good sweetie."  
he's got his eyes slammed shut again as andrew works. the sweat's pouring off him, soaking over andrew's hands, like he's in the midst of a fever, delirious and hallucinating, burning up. his fingers are digging so hard into the metal armrests that the skin's going splotchy white.  
andrew's pushing further in, making for the back of his throat. can hear gluskin fighting to breathe through his nose again, and it sounds like it's so stressful and so painful so he fucks his stupid mouth harder until his dick's blocking off his throat entirely, until he's choking loud and vocal around it.  
is he thinking of being back with those women, maybe? however he'd interpreted those experiences as he killed them? so angry, the stabbings and the mutilations and the uterus hand-torn from each woman's gut. there's a photo in the file of bodies hanging by their necks in a large shed they were found in on gluskin's property, one photo of a dark room and corpses hanging like drying game. is gluskin back there right now in his mind, standing in that shed looking at his work and remembering that power? that control? distancing himself from this rape into his own private world?  
he shouldn't be thinking of anything but this. he doesn't get to fucking zone out.  
  
"you're," swallowing hard and andrew's headache is chawing violently on the wet pink sponge of his brain, anger seething and seeping through his skull like thorny vines, voice hissing because fuck gluskin, fuck him for making him wake up so early, fuck him for giving dale something to talk andrew's ear off about, fuck him for pitching fits and nearly kicking his throat in and making andrew deal with his stupid ass at all, "making daddy feel so good, princess."  
and he wants him to suffer. he hates him in the hysterical little part of his brain that makes him dream of sunlight and bird noises and everything he can't fucking have. hates him like it's all directly his fault.  
  
"my beautiful girl," he's near drooling as he grinds himself inside, searching, grasping for the right word, the right button that he knows has to be in there somewhere that's going to drive this all the way down to where it needs to be. flashing back to the chickenscratch handwriting he'd seen on the backs of the polaroids. "my _sweetheart,_ little _angel,_  
"my  
" _darling._ "  
  
there it is.  
the right word and gluskin's going bug eyed, turning near green, making a horrible squealing noise like a pig, a pig being stabbed. ohh there, _there,_ there it is, _there it is._ there's saliva hanging in thick ropes off his chin already but his mouth instantly starts watering, dripping, rippling senselessly. he's thousand-yard-staring up at andrew like he's seeing right through him, staring into space, into a spot on the ceiling just above him. andrew knows what's coming and speeds up, hard as steel in his throat. he doesn't care. he doesn't care.  
"what's wrong?" faster, stabbing, angrier, "what's wrong babygirl?  
"you gonna be sick?"  
  
it's just stomach acid, caustic-smelling and mucusy and splattering down into gluskin's lap, and his eyes finally just give up and roll all the way up into the back of his head as he vomits. andrew's out of his mouth a second before it happens, backing up and out of the way of the blast radius, letting the man be sick on himself. letting him dissolve. can feel the sweat rolling down his ribs, his heart thundering underneath his scrubs. he wants to watch this happen forever.  
"you alright?" he's walking back in, crushing in, pumping the slippery head of his cock through his fist, barreling ahead towards the end, approaching, reaching, "are you sick? is something wrong?"  
  
gluskin's head is limp and listless, facing straight down into his lap, saliva and puke puddling between his legs on the seat. sweat soaked hair in his face and great heaving breaths like he's drowning. floundering in open water in the middle of the sea. andrew's fingers find his hair again and wrench his head back, forcing his face up. gluskin looks like death, fading, quivering, melting down into something simple and exhausted and angry. _angry._  
  
"what?" andrew can feel it coming, it's twisting up tight along his nerves, clenching, dripping, "what's wrong?"  
  
gluskin makes one long sound, so low, so guttural and raw and _furious_ it's like white hot murder, like he could kill andrew, kill him right fucking there if he could get out of this seat, crack his body open right down the fucking center and grab the viscera and tear everything out that he can reach and then andrew's there, gritting his teeth tight and hissing and finishing across the mess on his face, one stringy rope of cum hitting him right in the open eye and gluskin " _HHH_ "s like he's being burned by it, tries lurching his head away out of andrew's grip and fails, grunts and groans through how much it's stinging. andrew hopes it's really stuck in there. he hopes it's hurting. he wants it hurting.  
  
"what?" andrew's saying again between gasping for breath, his legs shaking, ( _fuck,_ fuck, jesus) squeezing himself still and then his gloved hand is out of gluskin's hair and he balls it up and _hits_ him, once, straight in the beaten stomach muscles again and gluskin _shouts-_ gags, heaves, nothing coming out, nothing but saliva. his upper body's doubling over. choking on nothing. loud, wide open noises as he struggles, vocal and toneless and meaningless. pain. pain everywhere in his body.  
  
"did you get sick?"  
  
he doesn't respond, doesn't move until andrew slams his palm against his forehead and pushes his head back up, smearing part of the mess of vomit and cum over the side of his face when some of his glove lands in it by mistake.  
  
"what happened to you?" andrew's scanning his eyes across gluskin's face, back and forth, like he's concerned. like he doesn't see the shit all over him. like it isn't there. like nothing is out of the ordinary. gluskin is staring at him like he's grown a second head. 'what is this,' the look in his eyes is saying.  
  
"you sat down and got sick. you got a stomach bug?

"well. good thing you just joined us here, right? we can take care of you now."  
  
_what is this._  
gluskin's mouth is opening and nothing is coming out. staring like his eyes are about to pop out of his fucking skull. _what are you talking about,_ the look on his face says for him.  
_this isn't what you said would happen,_ it says.  
_you said i could go after this,_ it says.  
  
_you said i could go._  
  
andrew's looking right back into his face, right at eye level. smiling,  
  
"wanna sleep the stomachache off?"  
  
and reaching in from either side,  
before one ninety-six realizes what's happening,  
  
"ready to go to bed?"  
  
and snapping the skull restraints on.  
  
  
  
the screaming is so loud, so piercing and so insane, that when andrew's migraine spikes and flares up through the lingering scraps of afterglow in response to the sound, when he turns and leaves through the glass sliding doors, when he peels his other glove off and dumps it at a suddenly completely mute dale's feet and tells him to get the apcd hormone injected and get the fucking sequence going and finish up here, when he leaves to clean the mess off his hands,  
  
he can hear it faintly, the sound just barely echoing down the hall, into the restroom he's in while he stands there at the sink with his eyes shut and one wet washed hand shielding the top half of his face. so the too-bright fluorescent light just above him in the ceiling doesn't reach him.  
  
  
screaming, and screaming, and screaming.

  
  
  


  
  
  


-

  
  
  


art by [rj](https://meanboss-art.tumblr.com/)


	3. stoned circular

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> wrapup procedures of second to last session

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> title is a [black light district track.](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V45J8hHb6g0)

the tumor's grown.

it's a blank space on the output screen. a splotchy white mass nestled in the right half of the patient's brain like a seed in soil. a pale naval mine floating in milky grey seawater. an acorn-sized time bomb.  
"shit," dale says stupidly from behind his opaque mask, standing at the podium outside the room and staring up at the screen.  
andrew doesn't say much.

it's been seven months, and seven months is just about the amount of time it takes for the first of the tumors to start showing up.  
one ninety-six's appeared two months ago, back in july, right around the time they first started flooding him with higher doses of apcd hormone to try and get his stupidly high rate of cell death under control, or at least down to something manageable. it had appeared, and they'd been working on shrinking the mass of cancer ever since. so far, the efforts have been unsuccessful. it's only gotten bigger.

right now, there's only the one, sitting dead center in the right hemisphere. but andrew already knows there will be more. he's seen this happen before, plenty of times, patient cells multiplying out of control from the combo of apcd hormones and m.e. therapy. the tumor's just the first of many. the first of dozens. hundreds, eventually. countless speckled little white blotches, converging, joining into one solid mass. they start inside the body and work their way out like they're running out of room in there, erupting up through bone and skin as they blossom up from underneath. dense little carcinogen sprouts. mushrooms. fungi.

but for now, it's just the one.

the sequence is drawing to a close.  
it's been the usual hour long three-stage journey, and one ninety-six stopped making any kind of noise around the 40 minute mark. no motion, no sound. from the glassy look on his face, no thoughts.  
dale unstraps his skull, and his head immediately rolls forward as though on a loose ball joint. boneless. staring straight down into his lap. his mouth has been moving. is still moving. no sound coming out.  
this is all normal for him.

when andrew lifts one ninety-six's face by his chin, the pupil on his right eye is blown wide and dead. he shines a small pocket flashlight inside the black space. no contraction. dale's pried a ballpoint pen out of the top of his clipboard, and he makes a note.  
they're used to this routine. eyes, temperature, any vomiting, sweating, fever. one ninety-six is still huge, but he's deflated over time, a loss in muscle mass from the seven months he's been rotting here. his skin is beginning to sag as the meat underneath it shrinks. the medical examiners catalog weight before the patients reach the technicians, so it's not their job to note or notice. but the lost weight is clearly visible. tangible. andrew can feel the thinned change in size and density when he puts his hand on the back of one ninety-six's neck. steadying him as he examines.

it's not their job to record weight. it's not their job to try and decipher the soundless words he's mouthing either. but andrew looks into his face a little longer than necessary. he looks, and he tries to understand.

dale's stepped out to the podium, and now he's coming back in with the printouts.  
"not good," he's mumbling aloud as he's scratching numbers from the result sheets into the appropriate slot on his clipboard. "same as last time. stuck down at 89 parts per million, pcd keeps rising - last dream had him up to almost two hundred million cell deaths a minute."  
talking to himself, mostly. he's at the point in his career that he knows andrew is listening but isn't going to answer back. probably not going to under any normal circumstances. definitely not going to when he's occupied with something. like he is right now.

nervous little talker.

there's the sound of squeaky wheels and echoing footsteps of the single approaching security guard - jim again, probably - coming with a wheelchair to escort one ninety-six back to his cell in the brief window of time they've got before he starts waking up. pushing a patient back to his cell is like pushing a cadaver around. only one man is really needed for the job as long as they're relatively quick about it.  
so andrew knows he doesn't have too long with him here.  
he's looking closely at his patient's lips as dale prattles on about apoptosis and cancer and hundreds of millions of brain cell deaths. that's dale's job to keep record of, not his. one ninety-six, staring off at a spot on andrew's face, just left of his nose, is mouthing something slowly in silence. long strings of sloppy vowel shapes and tongue movements. 'uuhh,' 'urrr,' 'eeee.'  
the engine visuals are off, the screens have been shut down, but one ninety-six is still dreaming. he's wrapping up the last segment of the three part process on his own.

andrew always wonders about this final dream.  
the first two programmed dream sequences, he doesn't know what they are either. but he isn't interested in them. they're manufactured by the guys downstairs. they're guided and artificial and are, ultimately, someone else's ideas. not the patient's.  
but sequence three, when they allow the patient to freeform dream, walk his own way through his private REM world, that's the part andrew is always curious about. curious especially because he has no way of really finding out the details. the contents of the final dream come out afterwards over time in interviews with a patient's observing physician, a slow build of changes over months in demeanor, in behavior, in thought.  
changes that aren't andrew's job to interview one ninety-six about. that's snow's, and the bank of further interview material that snow was willing to share dried up long ago. so andrew's in the dark.  
andrew's put together what he can from the way one ninety-six's behavior has changed over the months. snippets of the third dream phasing their way into conscious demeanor. in how he'd begun interacting with andrew without quite understanding who or what andrew was, in the moments before therapy began. like the patient doesn't know he's awake.

but what kind of a dream is it. what kind of dream is one ninety-six having that's spiking his rate of brain cell death up as high as it's going.

the thinking required on that isn't really part of his job. that's what the more math-minded employees are for.

'arrr,' the stupefied thing in the chair mouths. 'iiihn.'

one ninety-six still has no lucidity or conscious control over what he's dreaming. no control over the changes taking place in his brain. the low 89 ppm confirms that. what kind of dream is he being swept away by, that he's still so sucked in by it even now. taking silently to it, speaking to the murky shadow figures he's seeing within it.

it occurs to andrew then, who had been so busy scrutinizing the little details that he'd missed the forest for the trees, that one ninety-six has locked eyes with him at some point. there's a tender expression that's crawled across the patient's face like a skin infection, like he's gazing up into a lover's eyes. there's a private gentleness there that threw andrew off a little bit the first time he saw it, back in july. but now it's normal. it's expected.  
it's an integral part of one ninety-six's dream, whoever or whatever he's perceiving andrew to be right now. the intimate way he's looking at him. the patient's mouth is quirking into a lopsided stroke victim smile, stuttering through the muscle contractions like he can't remember how to move his face or use his voice. 'arrr, ihhhnn,' it mouths in silence again, eyes going a jelly soft at the corners, crows feet creasing.

whoever one ninety-six is seeing, he's overwhelmed by how happy he is to be seeing them. maybe he even loves them.

andrew used to think it was one ninety-six's mother, or a romanticized version of his mother that existed in the patient's head - the real woman was long gone, had been gone from the man's life since early childhood, according to the patient file. he thought the person one ninety-six was seeing was his mother, right up until the first time andrew leaned in and slid his tongue inside the idiot dreamer's mouth and - surprisingly - felt the shivery press of a partially numb tongue pushing back.  
he feels it again now, the thing flexing and twisting loosely, messily across andrew's teeth, against the inside of his lower lip, sluggish and half paralyzed but still with the nervous sloppy energy of a boy. like an adolescent about to get his dick wet for the first time.

"ahhrrrllll," one ninety-six's sore voice finally creaks, cracks, unsteadily crawls its way out of his throat like something hatching and emerging from underground, breathing shaky and vocal against the inside of andrew's mouth, making sad little half-gasp sounds like the touches of andrew's tongue are shocking him, jolting him, like he's sinking his fingernails down into something so desperately longed for that he doesn't know what to do with it now that he's got it in front of him.  
comically hard in his ugly brown jumpsuit, crammed in tight against the inside of his thigh. he's always hard like this after the last dream. he has no idea where he is, who he is, who anyone in the room is.

maybe the freakshow really is seeing his mother.

jim the security guard is sitting in the doorway with the wheelchair, arms crossed and leaning back against the portion of wall behind him. not quite tapping his foot yet, but wanting to get this part of his day over with all the same. andrew pulls away and unceremoniously wipes his mouth on the back of his blue sleeve. one ninety-six, the cancer-riddled walking dead, just watches him retreat in silence, mouth still open in an only half-controlled invalid smile, one eye squinting and half lidded and the right eye uncontrollably wide, the eye with the blown-open pupil on the same side as the brain tumor. a black porthole, the wide end of a telescope leading straight down into the center of the right hemisphere and the tumor itself staring back out, staring andrew dead center and seeing nothing of him. just mother. weird oedipal fantasy mommy. dream lover.

he looks like a fucking idiot, and something intolerably angry bubbles up inside andrew so fast that out of nowhere he's full force striking one ninety-six across the face. heel of his hand cracking into cheekbone.  
one ninety-six's loosely held head head jolts hard to the side from the force, spit flying from his lips, but he makes no sound. nothing but a little puff of breath out from his nose. like he didn't feel it.

when he turns, slowly, and looks back up at andrew, his smile has changed.

it's wider.

it's wilder.


	4. red skeletons

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> early morning, september 17th 2013

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> small something
> 
> chapter title is a [black light district track](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O8gd6OcUqQI)

there's something wrong with the ambient lighting in andrew's room.

there's no use in asking about it anymore. because he knows they're not going to send anybody to repair it. he's asked already, months ago, for someone to please come in and fix it or turn it off or something, something in there is making these god awful buzzing sounds - with little response from anybody in charge other than an empty assurance of 'we'll look into it.' a reassurance, followed by absolutely nothing.  
it's a low shrill hum like sharp white noise, a piercing buzzing from something behind the frosted glass, some loose mechanism that he can't get to himself and forcibly pull off. he cranks the air conditioning in his room and balls up in his comforter so the hum of cold air will drown it out, maybe. but it doesn't help. the light is everywhere. he can hear it even if he can't see it now. crackling electrical buzzing, and he can't sleep. he can't sleep unless he's knocking himself out.

"you look like shit," dale mumbles through a half-chewed open-mouthed spoonful of grits. he'd been talking about something else a second ago. one ninety-six's exit interview that andrew has to do at 9 o clock, maybe. his thoughts on those. andrew hadn't really been listening.

they choke breakfast down at the same table in the mess hall. dale will come and sit down and start talking, and andrew will say nothing and allow for it, because it's easier to just let dale get the pleasantries and chitchat out of the way. it's the same tired routine that dale just has to go through in the morning of the days they're scheduled together. andrew lets him get all the talking he has to do over and done with right off the bat so he doesn't have to deal with it as much in the hallway, waiting for the elevator for what feels like hours. dale's determined to run his mouth. he's always been like that. andrew's figured out how to tolerate dale, but he doesn't like him any more than he did the first week he showed up to replace cracked-mask ralph. dale's always talking. dale just talks and talks.

"didn't you sleep?" dale's trying again. smacking his lips as he eats. opening yet another tiny salt packet for his grits and spilling half of it on the tray. drumming a few fingers against his grey shoulder bag on the table. dale has lots and lots of fun nervous habits.  
"i slept," andrew grunts as he sucks down the coffee. black and bitter and let's-just-get-this-over-with. it's so hot that it's almost burning his tongue, but he doesn't care and swallows it anyway. the heat scalding its way down his esophagus is a happy distraction from the exhausted throb in his skull. the migraine never quite goes away. he'd figured, the drinking at night wasn't helping it. the caffeine in the morning wasn't helping it. but he tried cutting back on both, and it didn't get any better.

"you never look like you do." slurp.  
"i always sleep," says andrew over the wonderful sounds of his coworker's loud eating. just coffee for him, no breakfast, thank you. he isn't hungry. the headache is sapping him of any appetite today. he'll eat later on lunch break, when the headache's let up, except he knows he won't eat, because he knows the headache won't have let up by that time. maybe nighttime, when he's alone in his room with the sheets over his head and his face dug into his pillow, with all the light blocked out, then he'll eat. cram down a few nutri-grains while in there, like he's a kid eating stolen fucking sweets in bed. except he knows the light will be there too. he'll hear the light even if he can't see it.

the ambient light in his room is keeping him awake, even when he knows logically that he must have slept. it's keeping him from dreaming, even with vivid memories of dreams of trees and sunshine and birds (flocks of birds, whole extended families of birds, thousands and thousands of birds singing and flying in huge black v formations across a white sky). he feels like he hasn't slept. feels it in his body and in the pits of his foggy migraine-flickering brain that he couldn't possibly have slept. 6am and his alarm goes off and he's awake, bone-tired and staring into the insides of his itchy comforter. the bruise-looking purple bags under his eyes have only gotten darker as the time's gone on. as the months have gone on. the years. his face feels like it could drip off his skull sometimes. numb, loose skin, and aching eyes, and tired.

tired.

angry.

he'd dreamt of geese that morning. what he assumes now were supposed to be geese. birds. he was in one of the brown patient uniforms and standing barefoot in an empty place. an endless flat field of dirt, speckled with dead grass and one black tree in front of him. branches choking with leaves that fragmented off into blue and black mandelbrot fractals. looping spiral infinite. twisting and squirming and narrowing. a sky a deep wet white like bone, like an exposed ribcage with a throbbing electric blue heart in its center.  
birds, millions of these black geese spilling from nowhere from behind this tree, fanning wide out into the sky, a perfect mirror image down the center. blotting out a supernova sun. millions of mouths. millions of chitters and chirps and calls of individual notes, choiring together in a song he couldn't understand. couldn't begin to understand. a song with notes he had never heard before. a song that writhed its way into his body through his ears and in through the pupils of his eyes, somehow. in through his mouth, over his tongue with the sour taste of metal. like chewing on tinfoil. like swallowing a battery. like a hand, a fist reaching down his esophagus. looking for something.

"andrew?" dale's calling in timidly from the glass doorway.

the man in the metal restraints in front of him is shaking like a leaf, shivering and sputtering in the chair like he doesn't remember words or language at all anymore. hyperventilating breaths rippling in panic out from his lungs with a thick wet slug trail of andrew's saliva cooling disgustingly over the side of his face.  
he's terrified, this man. terrified, because nothing like this has ever happened to him before, never, never in his life, and andrew can't stop his mouth from folding up at the corners into the start of a smile, can't stop himself from staring, openly scrutinizing, watching the man's little emotional experience play out over his features. bloom outward along the muscles underneath the man's sweaty skin. blossom, and unfold, and grow-

"you getting these alerts?" dale's interjecting again, an anxious little stutterquiver in his voice, obnoxious against andrew's ears like a squealy sharp violin. like buzzing.

"kinda busy here," he hears himself condescend in the door's direction. he's only half paying attention. less than half. dale isn't even a blip on his radar. because he's just so taken by the man's newness. that this man wasn't originally a patient here, he was an employee. they didn't receive any kind of expounding file on him, but andrew can tell. from the way he breathes. from the dead shock on his face. there's too much sharp clarity in his eyes, too much awareness of his situation. he wasn't a patient at all until a couple of hours ago. he has no idea what's coming.

and really, that newness is a treat. a new person, a really _new_ person like this, is always a rare treat. new, fresh, squeaky clean mr. twenty-five thirty-six here is going to be a huge treat. a breath of fresh air. a short reprieve from the usual daily grind, from the braindead urine-soaked inmates who can't even tell what year it is, who just sit there silent or babbling and screaming andrew's own word choices back at him. this one's going to be good to watch melt, like running steaming hot water over a mass of ice in the sink. satisfying. he can feel the ideas bouncing off the insides of his skull already, bright flashing-light thoughts like electricity winding up his spine about what the taste of the whites of the man's eye is going to be like, about how he thinks the man's face is going to twist up, how far he's going to have to push until the man cracks and cries and start bargaining with the nothing that he has. the 'oh no's and the 'i have a family's, maybe, and the 'don't do this god god please's, about the hypodermic needle with the apcd dose sitting in the cart to the left of the chair, the needle that he's going to stab-inject into the man's thigh first and then squeeze the needle tip in right underneath twenty-five thirty-shit's fucking pisshole, nice and slow and savory and ask him why he's crying, what's wrong, what hurts, tell me where it hurts, i'm here to help you, it sounds like real  
trouble-

"-at the engine?  
"they said hope made a lateral ascension-"

suddenly everything, every thought in andrew's head is coming to a dead screeching stop. full force down on the brakes on a glossy rainy road. the squealing of tires.

that's gotten his attention. that's gotten his full attention.

"billy hope?" he's up, straightening and taking his hands off the arms of the chair, staring dale directly in the face. mask. whatever.  
billy hope-  
one seventy-four, the one with the blood that wouldn't separate in the centrifuges. the one that had been taking to the therapy so well with the growing control over the changes taking place in his brain, with his m.e. activity already sky high at hundreds of thousand of parts per million,  
that kind of control,  
and he's-

"and they're not happy about it?"

and andrew can almost see the wide-eyed helpless look dale's making from behind his mask, the microscopic useless shrug amidst the freezing up he's doing in the doorway. the engine screens are flashing on behind them, half reflecting in a white blur off the round dome of dale's mask, and screen's noises almost drown out dale's next word, it's so quiet.  
so quiet.

hundreds of thousands of parts per million that hope's able to control and he's just-

skyrocketed up from there-

"no."


	5. the mirror reflecting

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> early morning september 17th 2013, and then a little later

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this chunk's just been sitting on my phone since january, and i'd ideally like to get this show on the road at some point. didn't mean for it to get this "plot" heavy, but i'm having fun with it
> 
> haxan cloak track this time - [part 1](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9jOZrlL6oeM) and [part 2](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZhhdnegHSA)

it's 9am, and because legal is going to need security camera footage of them having a conversation, he looks up into the thing's glassy eyes and asks, "how's your wife?"  
the smile he gets in response is warm, saccharine, like it thinks it's authentic. could melt the heart of anyone who didn't know better.

"ohh. she's lovely," it exhales in an oozy, lisping tone, taking these slow deep breaths that rock its upper body back and forth on the stretcher security has it seated on. clink and clink and clink of the links of its wrist and ankle shackles coming together. "she's wonderful. an angel as always. she wrote me again you know. same as last time, can't stop talking about how much she misses me."

"poor thing," andrew says in as interested a monotone as he can manage and looks back down to cross something private off on the plastic black clipboard he's got in his hands. they've had these clipboards forever. years. under the top sheet he's looking at are tumor photocopies. endless notes in shitty handwriting that added up to, 'ppm numbers are too low and cell death is too high.' 'therapy's not working.' 'not financially viable to keep one ninety-six anymore.'

"lonesome thing," it agrees. "when do you think i can see her?" it's asking with a forward tilt of its head, a little batting of its eyelashes. the hard creased lines around its mouth deepen on one side when it smiles. "she's lonely without me. she writes and writes about how much she misses me. letter after letter. bless her little girl heart. when can i go home?"

"real soon, mr. gluskin." half listening. this is the fifth time they've had this exact conversation. scritch and scratch of his half-dried ballpoint pen over the paperwork. checking off what applies. it's a consent form the thing needs to sign, and andrew's filling in the blanks as are appropriate. "i'm working on your discharge papers now."

"she's a firecracker y'know," like it didn't even hear him. there's a lewd little halfsmile creeping up its mouth that it doesn't seem to have control over. it's lopsided where the right half of its pasty sun-starved face still doesn't respond quite right. half lidded and quiet like it's exchanging a lascivious little secret with andrew that it doesn't want the rest of security in the room to hear. it barely acknowledged the four guards that brought it in when they did, and only now does it lean in, ostensibly away from their prying greedy ears, sharing this little tidbit about its beautiful wife with Andrew The Nice "Doctor" That It Has Never Seen Before In Its Life.  
"you should see some of what she writes me," it breathes. "she likes to push my buttons when she knows that i can't," and it laps quickly, unconsciously, at its thin purple lower lip, but the inside of its mouth is too dry, and its tongue delivers no saliva, "that i can't. repay her."

"uhuh?" like andrew hasn't heard this before. like he hasn't already heard this story about the imaginary pornographic letters that its imaginary wife sends it. he's bored of it now. he's bored of this story. he's bored of its delusions and bored of its reactions. he's been bored for over a month. he'd appreciated the crying more, and the little suspicious attitude it gave him in spite of its lack of conscious memory of any specific instances of abuse. that was funny. but it's too far gone now to fully understand what's happening to it anymore. too wrapped up in its story. and now it bores him. he's had enough. he wants this to be finished.

most of all, he wants to get the thing's signature on this consent form for life pod exposure in the next couple of minutes. so they can have security camera footage of it smiling, nodding, agreeing, and signing this. so the signature doesn't need to be forged later for any hypothetical legal issues that could come up in the future. there are endless manila folders full of signed life pod consent forms in filing cabinets in some offices somewhere on premises, and when the signatures on these need to be forged because of some fuckup where they can't get a patient to do it, for whatever reason, then people get irritated. legal gets irritated. the offices get irritated. the people in charge of getting that particular signature get the brunt of it. he doesn't want to hear it. if he has to hear it in passive aggressive status update emails from brendan one more fucking time. one more fucking time. sometimes when he's supposed to be sleeping but really is lying facedown in his mattress instead, wide awake and encased airtight in every sheet he owns, breathing in the damp hot buildup of stale air, he thinks about twisting his black rubbery hands around brendan's fat white hyperthyroidic neck and breaking it. getting behind him and grabbing under his chin (his chins) and bending his head back. he can sort of hear it if he closes his eyes and thinks about it. crunchy crunch of bone and disc breaking apart. slow dark purpling of skin and meat. it's vivid behind his eyes in a way that makes him feel like maybe he's asleep when he thinks of this. dreaming.

he wants this part finished. he wants this process with this particular object that he's grown bored of finished.

they'd try one more time in the life pods, for the sake of having tried all roads. one final flood in the main engine room's life pods, one cocktail of acpd hormone as close as to the max amount allowed as possible. one big push to encourage growth of the kinds of cells they needed and not cancer cells. hopefully not riddle the entire mass of one ninety-six's brain and body with tumors.

it would either work, or it wouldn't. but not so quietly, they all knew that with one ninety-six's track record. it wouldn't.

so this would be the last time he'd see one ninety-six.

one ninety-six had been - not fun, but. an alright reprieve from the ordinary. a decent pincushion. moreso, a thought exercise to distract himself with. he'd stared at one ninety-six's vacant eyes and wondered about his dreams over the past span of months often, more often than he'd care to admit. inner cognitive workings and private moments that andrew would never see and now never be able to uncover. secrets that would melt down into soupy fluid as the cell death in the patient's brain progressed, consuming his speech, his motor functions, his sentience. secrets one ninety-six would suck down into the grave along with him now.

"she wants to," and its leg is bouncing in a way it's not aware of, rattling the loose things on the stretcher, a spare pen jiggling up and down and trying to roll off onto the floor, "start a family soon. did you know? she wants children, a big family, she keeps," smile becoming less of a smile and more of a simple gritted baring of all the dry, yellow teeth in its mouth, "talking about it, she keeps talking about how much she wants it from me, no modesty or subtly at all and, she's excited, she's excited but it's, it's no way for a, a woman to act, little, tease-"

jim is standing right by the mumbling giggling patient's side, and jim is not in the mood. he is not in the fucking mood. andrew can see him clenching and unclenching his free fist out of the corner of his eye. jim has had it up to here with this story, they all have. all of them are tired but need to do their jobs, so andrew is giving jim a look like he isn't entirely sure if jim's going to keep himself under control. a wordless, flat glance that says, 'please jim, don't turn this into a situation jim.'  
jim inhales through his broad nose and squeezes one big fat fist tight and then just lets it sit there motionless at his side, clenched but steady. still.

maybe jim hasn't been sleeping too well either.

but one ninety-six gets to sleep. dream. one ninety-six gets to dream all it wants now, stumble through an unending dream sequence of _mommy mommy wifey._

all of the patients succumbed to therapy and did this, eventually. it didn't usually make him this angry. but he's never really gone this long without sleep before.

but did daydreams count as sleeping?

-

so he and dale, they leave running.

the two of them running, running full tilt out of the room, running through the sliding plexiglas doors as soon as they slide themselves open and forward still. are they the only ones running? there's nobody else here in the hallway except for them. they can hear a security guard's radio going off somewhere in the distance ahead of them, loud insistent direction, please all security with block D clearance, report to the morphogenic engine chambers. andrew's knees are shrieking at him already and they're going to completely fucking hate him for this in the morning but he runs anyway. he's running, and he's turning his head and asking dale something like, "did they say what hope's ppm was," and dale makes a sound like he's starting to open his mouth to answer, "he-" when the noises over the radio ahead of them warp into shouting and dale falters. they both do, stumbling over their own feet and skidding on the white floor for half a second as the voice rips over the radio around the corner, loud like the person is shouting over- panic?

he's panicking?

andrew's swallowing hard at a strange round lump of nothing in his throat, something invisible and thick, like a fist, and they're running their asses faster. they approach the corner and turn messily around it, and the source of the noise is on the floor in front of them, a black radio laying discarded, flat on its back like a dead animal, with its owner nowhere in sight. they stop dead and the thing on the floor crackles loudly to life again, a haze of strange squealing noise. people talking in quick fast stacatto voices, loud and openly nestled on the slippery edge of hysteria, and a man on the other end shouting directly into the microphone over a background chorus of a high, wavering electrical interference, 'ALL BLOCK D CL--RD-- TO ---VAC- TE TH-

'R-P--T-,

'B---CK D STA-F-'

dale tries to scoop up the radio as they start up running again but drops it, fumbles trying to grab at it again, and then just leaves it. the thing begins shouting something frantically behind them as they pull further away. but the static interference is too great, and they've already moved too far away to decipher it.

they sprint away from the hall where the radio's fallen, onward, twisting through corridors and barreling down sets of metal stairs in dead silence except for their heavy breathing, their conjoined animal panting as they run and run in a winding path that is entirely too long - headed for the D block, for the morphogenic engine life pod chambers, where hope is, where andrew thinks he heard the man on the radio mention. instruction to go towards. fuck. fuck.  
they reach a fork, and andrew banks left, in deeper towards the pods with dale following half a step behind, running until they reach and breach through the crash doors and come racing into the huge space of the black engine's home, a globe hanging like an insect egg, drooping thick, heavy, pregnant, down from the darkness in a clutch somewhere underground. they're stumbling in towards the center pods, an empty chair surrounded by flashing monitors, control panels, no people.  
no one is here. the alarms on the engine and its dozens of screens are all going off in an empty room.  
they've left. everyone's left.

all at once, andrew realizes that coming here was a mistake.  
the room is empty. whatever decision pod staff made, they made it long before he and dale arrived. ten minutes too late. half a minute too late. everyone is long fucking gone. this was a mistake, and there is a sudden icy feversweat shooting to life along the gooseflesh at the back of andrew's neck, a feeling like cold water rising through his body, like the hairs along his flesh are raising, lifting in anticipation of a lightning strike. the air cold and clammy around him. dewy, like early morning, home, with something lifting its shiny wet head up from the cold pre-dawn ground on his lawn. the prior staff left for a reason and here they are, here andrew and dale are anyway and dale is finding the will in him to break his freeze and move forward for the first time in his dumb fucking life, dale is stumbling ahead towards hope's pod and gawking dumbly at the monitor next to it and his voice is,

"it's holy SHIT SIX HUNDRED THOUSAND PPM AND-"

a mistake to be here,  
mistake,  
a split second before billy hope's body in the tank, his ragged half naked body skewered on rods and tubes tunneling down into his bones, into his airways and stomach and the secret place where his heart lay planted, before the muscles in billy hope's body clench and arch him hard, with his mouth opening wide and

the air around the circular tank displaces, ripples, like glassy clear water distorted by a rock plummeting through it to the bottom, like the rising of a tremendous sudden heat, and

"-coming out," someone in the room is speaking at dale but too quietly, the adrenaline and migraine pain pounding so thick and pressurized and dizzy in andrew's brain that he has no idea whose voice it could be, like he's watching someone else inhabiting his own body, making the noises for him in a slow motion slur,  
"something's,

"coming out-"

before hope's mouth gapes wide around the tubes in his throat,  
and there is a thunderclap blinding explosion of bathroom fluorescent lights and nauseous migraine visuals, drunken spinning humid air, a blinding sun and black birds singing the exact same hazing insectoid squeal that comes from behind the window in andrew's quasi-hotel room, it floods the air blank inside the whole room, erases everything from under and around andrew's body, blots out the world into a white space, into nothing.  
into a holy nuclear light  
. .

 

. .

 

.


	6. i'm coming to the garden..... no sound,no memory

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> september 17th 2013
> 
>  
> 
> [merzbow](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9SDv8VBrXao)

_do you think i was too forward with her?_

\- 

\- 

he - his own self - he is there - behind the tree, a mirror imaged black stretching of branches. his own self, fractured and fractalled and multiplied thousands of miles wide, splattered across a black horizon, expanding and contracting, like his breath, like the pulsing of a massive heart he can feel throughout his whole being. congealing down, condensing further - andrew's body an incoherent mess of haze, static, glowing television snow, the electron tug his 5-year-old self felt in his fingertips while skating them across a CRT monitor. lights behind his eyes, bursting out from the hard peach-pit of his brain and exploding out of his eye sockets - blinding him, burning their mirror image footprints into his retinas. his body as a swarming mass of countless bugs, like his nerves can feel each individual cell that compose him jittering against one another, vibrating, faster and faster, like he’s about to fly apart and fall to pieces, evaporate. dissolve. lights. halos of noise. oceans of pressurized song. squealing. insects. insect. lights.

he is aware of himself for a moment as a point in space existing outside of himself, staring down at his own splayed crooked body as a fly on the ceiling, like his consciousness and perception are blown out his skull and waiver through the air, bodiless, shapeless. flashes of visual noise. songs in his blood. he blinks and opens his eyes to find himself on the ground, staring up from the engine room floor, sense planted deep back inside his self and gazing numb, stupid, out into the blackness around him. the power in the room is out, the electricity is cut and the fluorescent bulbs sit dead above him on the ceiling. and in the blackness, when his eyes roll down, he can see the slow dribble of wormy strands of lights pouring out from under his gloves. pouring from his mouth. his nose- his ears-

he scrabbles - his body stutters and vibrates in place, like a knocked over wind-up toy, like his brain can’t remember how to connect with the nerves and muscles to make himself move - and jerks his clawed rubbery fingers violently up to his face, over his ears, soaking in the thick light pouring out. he can barely breathe, and his palms crush in over his closed eyes, scrubbing and grinding down, to banish the visions of light, the brightness in the pitch black room. blot out the sight of sound. he wheezes wet and blinks through sticky iron-tasting fluid, and the light seeping from his ears and nose and inside his lips suddenly isn’t light at all. it’d always been blood.

he must’ve bitten something in his mouth. he tries to explore the space with his hand, slithering it down in a seizing zigzag from his eye and prying in past his gums. no cuts, but he can feel a ragged sinking in his bottom jaw through the gloves. the sunken wet holes of his bottom front teeth knocked out.  
did- had he been thrown? was that was that was before? did he get thrown and hit something, a railing or a piece of equipment - how bad off was he if his ears were bleeding-

all at once, with the comprehension of the blood, the teeth, the damage to his body: the pain starts.

it’s like an animal slowly waking up. seeping out of the core of him like something hatching and sliding its extremities out into open space, pain wriggling and itching through the passageways of his arteries. the blood in his mouth tastes thick, wrong, too deeply like metal. mercury and its luminescence. the taste of wet black dirt, gritty mud, spilling out of the sockets where his fucking _teeth_ used to be. the pain radiates, further, harder, like it’s being spun out away from the center of his body in a centrifuge, winding its way down his nerves, and then taking a right turn at his pelvis and rocketing straight down into his fucking knee.

he _jolts,_ tries to roll to one side, to get himself up off the floor, and he cannot - the leg, the knee, it _wails_ in pain, in a voice that comes out of his throat but doesn’t sound anything like him. high pitched. squealy feeble. he writhes in place in the blackness and the shape of the pain congeals, takes form further. clots. he hauls his upper body upright, balanced on an elbow. he reaches, he presses his fingers (violently, _hysterically_ stammering digits that he can barely make listen to him) overtop the pants leg of his blue scrubs where his knee is and can feel hard things jabbing out from underneath, piercing up from under his skin like something trying to puncture its way out.  
it’s, bone, splinters of bone-

the fluorescent lights on the ceiling flicker for a second, and his bugged-out eyes catch a glimpse at what he’s been groping at - his leg, his shin twisted inward and facing the wrong way, his right foot pointing too far towards his left-  
his hand fumbles, and in the darkness he feels a piece of bone _flake off_ underneath his prodding fingers, and he feels the want for vomiting in his throat, gorge weaving its acid way up his esophagus, coating his back teeth in bile. salivary glands _squirting._

the overhead lights flicker again, flash once, and the visions of bugs and trees bite into the back of his skull - like it was waiting for him to lose focus and get distracted by his broken knee, and then strike. visions like snippets of a taped-over movie bleeding through a vhs - _tv static writhing its little particles over a rotting open wound. bird song screaming in every note conceivable. a fibrous blue nictitating membrane peeling back from his own newborn compound eyes._ \- and from far away he can hear himself, feel himself shrieking and beating his fists against the floor, beating his palms against his own forehead-

 _the swarm’s out, he’s been exposed,_ something screams out from the pits of his head, a voice flickering, near drowned out in the roar of electricity in his skull. he can almost hear his own voice over the noise, the _lights,_ the sound of his voice paper-thin like it’s feebly clinging to a stray branch on a tree in a cyclone. the throbbing pain in his mouth (the roots of his teeth still stuck down beyond the gumline, pulsing like they’re living breathing things, _little white slivers, maggots burrowing in the soft insides of his head-_ ) 

 

_block d staff_

_vacate the area_

_block d staff_


End file.
